Margaret Packham Hargrave

Margaret Packham Hargrave (born 8 November 1941) is an Australian writer. She is the author of Jake's Luck (1994) and A Woman of Air (1996) – winner of the inaugural Elle/Random House Fiction Prize.

Margaret Packham Hargrave

Life and career

Margaret Packham was born in Sydney, Australia and attended Sutherland High School. She studied voice with Raymond Beatty and viola with Georgiana Maclean at the NSW Conservatorium of Music concurrently with nursing at Sydney Hospital. Subsequently, she completed a BA in English and Psychology and MLitt (Middle English/Chaucer) at the University of New England (NSW) and a DipEd at Mitchell College (Bathurst, NSW) and had a career first as a Nursing academic, during which time her research paper 'Literature in the Nursing Course' was published in The Australian Journal of Advanced Nursing, Autumn, 1986. She then became a teacher of secondary English before committing herself to writing.

Packham has had numerous short stories and poems published in Westerly, Meanjin, The Sydney Morning Herald, Cleo, Grass Roots and Matilda. A book of her poems (Midnight Fugue, Saturday Centre Press) appeared in 1983.

She has recently developed an interest in screenwriting and her first short film (A Difficult Patient) is in post-production with Tony Chu of NAFA Productions as director. Original music composed by Nathan Chan.

She is the grandmother of Australian child actors Clancy Ryan (Razzle Dazzle: A Journey into Dance) and Lochie Ryan (Footy Legends', Gone).

Bibliography

Short stories

• 'The Sound of Crying', Cleo, August, 1974
• 'The Chiffionier', Westerly (4), 1988
• 'Domestica', Westerly (1), 1989
• 'Small Fame', Westerly(4), 1989
• 'My Sister's Memory', Meanjin (1), 1990

Poetry

• Midnight Fugue, Saturday Centre Books, 1983. (A collection of own work)
• Anthologised in: Poets' Choice, 1977; Holes in the Evening (1982), Fat Possum Press; and That Moon-Filled Urge (1985), Kardoorair Press.

Novels

• Jake's Luck (1994) Allen & Unwin
• A Woman of Air (1996) Vintage/Random House. Recipient of Elle/Random House Fiction Prize.

Articles

• 'A Tale of Two Lives', Family Circle, June, 2004 (Writing as Inez Frazer)
• 'New Horizons: Literary Studies in the Nursing Course', The Australian Journal of Advanced Nursing, Vol. 3 No. 1 (1985), cited in Begley, Ann-Marie, 'Literature and Poetry: Pleasure and Practice', International Journal of Nursing Practice (2), December, 1996